The Greatest Amish Baseball Player & the Father of the Sports Media Guide

[chuckw]

If there's one thing I learned from the Uncle Jimmy Collection journey, it's the incredible stories of the people behind the collections - big or small.

Jake Smucker is an Amish farmer who fell in love with baseball when he saw a TV for the first time in 1963 and watched Sandy Koufax lead the Dodgers to win the World Series! He also just may be the greatest Amish baseball player of all-time. Here are two stories of his collection, which he decided to auction after being inspired by the Uncle Jimmy collection and wanted to get money for family hunting trips (while still dreaming of sitting in the Dodgers dugout):

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...land-auctions/

https://www.psacard.com/articles/art...-ends-may-23rd

Marshall Samuel was a sports PR executive for professional sports teams over 4 decades and won championships with the Cleveland Browns (1964), the Cleveland Indians (1948), and the New York Yankees (1977 & 1978). An impressive 4 World Championships - 3 baseball and 1 football, and he is recognized as the "Father of the Sports Media Guide". His 1978 Yankees World Series championship ring is up for sale, but his story is amazing:

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...tland-auction/

Both collections are in our current auction that ends this Sunday (May 23rd)!
https://www.wheatlandauctionservices.com/catalog.aspx

[David W]

I have played softball against some very good Amish players in northern indiana.

[chuckw]

I found a story called “The Boys of Lancaster” by Kent Russell in 2013, with some great information about Amish baseball as he would watch games when traveling through Lancaster. Below are just some interesting parts from the long story:

“In the late ’40s and early ’50s, Amish ballplayers in Lancaster were recruited onto semipro teams. They played under assumed names so no neighbors would spot them in newspaper box scores. One of the last of them, a late pitcher whose deception was never found out, had a nephew living in the area, a prominent business owner.

Jim Smucker launched into a brief history of the Amish, explaining that what began three centuries ago as a handful of families escaping persecution in Europe by sailing for the nascent Pennsylvania colony is today 273,700 adults and children spread across 30 states and the Canadian province of Ontario. (Though two-thirds of them have remained in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.) Amish belief then as now is completely grounded in the New Testament, which they hold to be the sole and final authority on all things. And the Amish are a true community, in every sense of the word. Basically, the Amish way of living argues implicitly that tradition is sacred, that preservation is as important or perhaps more important than progress, that obeying and yielding are virtuous. He used to love baseball, he said, used to play all the time before it was banned in his order for adults. “It’s fine for kids to play. But as Paul says, ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ ”

Ballplayers, at last. Ten of them. They wore athletic shorts and cleats, but I knew they were Amish because they chattered misaligned English in elfin accents. “Attaway Amo!” shouted the guy nearest to me in left. “That’s how you Tootsie Roll!”. This was practice. They were a competitive slow-pitch team. I tossed the softball back over the fence. The fielder said, “Sorry, sir.” The kid at bat launched one on a directly proportional incline. It cleared the fence and burst the treetop above me, the ball then falling into my hands ahead of a clump of flittering leaves. I asked if I could shag with them. They waved me over and I ran to get my glove from the trunk of my rental car. I would prefer to keep with genre standards and describe these boys as a dugout’s worth of motley loners, but I can’t. They were as chippily uniform as a litter of golden retriever puppies: long limbs, tanned bodies, unstylish haircuts. The sons of farmers and craftsmen. They used Pennsylvania Dutch for jokes they didn’t want me to hear; for everything else, musty English learned in school.

They were 18, 19, but clearly had never been coached. Some stood in the batter’s box with their feet touching. One lefty pinced his right knee and elbow together crabwise before swinging. Another held the bat above his head as if preparing to beat a snake to death. Categorically, they creamed the ball. In the field, their each throw sizzled. They jumped into the path of hit balls as though playing through a emory. They dropped to one knee, two knees, laid out horizontally—whatever it took to block grounders. A freak hop bloodied the shortstop’s nose, and the cheer from right field was, “Ya, looks like ya need another Red BOOL, Morty!” Everybody laughed but me; Morty’s smile was wishboned by blood. “Ya, buy it with your credit card, credit card!” went the pitcher. I’ve played enough to feel OK saying: Never before had I seen a team of young men be so good without also being repulsively cocksure. These guys had a prelapsarian sweetness about them, this straight joy that I last knew as an adolescent dicking around with my friends Friday afternoons on a pebbly field behind a RadioShack.

The Amish, though, they didn’t seem to care who was watching. One after another, they stropped pitches over the fence. “Hyume run!” they said. “Holy smokes!”
Four Amish girls in heart-shaped bonnets stopped walking dogs to curl their fingers around the chain links. They had light eyes and sheer cheeks. “You girls runnin’ around, are ya now?” asked Aaron, the left-fielder. He nodded to the boy at the plate who then knocked one deep into the gap. I took a few perfunctory strides. Aaron ran hard enough to lose his hat. Then he dove, snagged the liner backhanded, and rolled into a somersault before springing to his feet. The ball was sticking half out of the top of his glove—a snow cone, you call it—and he feigned a lick. The girls tittered.

As Aaron and I trotted in from the outfield, I asked how his Rumspringa’s been. “Na, ya know. Other than ball, running around makes me feel restless.” He told me they had a play-off game that evening at a different park. I made him type the address directly into my phone.
This is the attraction, this idea of the Amish. That we might come to Lancaster and encounter what appears to be our past, the simple, rich, idyllic existence back when our freedom from had yet to develop into our freedom to. Here’s what we could have been had we stayed the inevitable.
It’s both condescending and a self- deception, of course, this idea. But in my car, I had to admit: It’s hard to lay off of. When I saw Amish in buggies waving across two lanes of traffic, it cheered me up. Their homogeneous presence was a merry sight, like nuns in habits at the airport. It’s a relief to know that people still live this way, because as these sorts of Jeffersonian fundamentals shrink further from our world, I find it more necessary than ever that someone harvest summer corn, cultivate virtue, play baseball. Abandoning that would mean something about us was dead, or at the very least outgrown, irretrievable.

I took a spot on the bleachers next to a stout Amish man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He’d taken off his clodhoppers so he could fan his toes on the row in front. Our view past the outfield fence was a darkening one of barns riding the corduroy swells of corn like arks. The floodlights switched on. “Looks like rain,” said the man next to me, whom let’s call “Dan” because, were his real name to appear in print, he’d be censured by the faithful. “What’s your phone say?”

This was the semifinal of a local league championship, the fifth game of a best-of-five series. The Amish boys had won the first two; the English men the last. About 80 or so Amish had come to watch. They outnumbered the English four to one.

Many were families, but most were young men from fast districts. They looked just like middle-American teens on television, all swooped bangs and skinny jeans tucked into fat-tongued sneakers. The few girls wore dresses and bonnets. The prettiest one sat in a truck that idled while “Call Me Maybe” spritzed through the cracked windows.

I told Dan that my weather app was saying all clear. In the dugout, the Amish boys brought it in and chanted, “One, two, three—KICK ASS!” before flowering their hands. I cringed and waited for the communal reprimand, but none came. A cloth-freckling rain began to fall. ...”

[chuckw]

Jake's local TV station captured a nice interview with him: https://www.fox43.com/article/news/l...f-cfaadad02830